Bøker av John Roche

Terryfaha tells the story of a rural farming family in Kerry, Ireland from 1832 until 1921 against the backdrop of Catholic Emancipation, The Famine & emigration, The Land Wars & evictions, World War I, Independence and the Civil War The story is fiction but based on true stories that were told around the fireside in the pre-electric light and television nights.

In my 80 plus years I have witnessed conditions little changed from the eighteenth century to today's world, where man-made satellites, reaching for distant planets, hardly arouse even passing interest. So all I can do is try to make my story, an Irishman's story, as interesting as possible as I weave all the strands of my life together - family, hardship, fun, recklessness, sport, politics and farming, and the incredible changes that have brought us from an isolated Ireland of the 1940s to the first world country of today.

Deborah Coy's Super Crone is a witty and delightful response to the challenges women over fifty face in our society, along with meditations on the Northern New Mexico landscape and her enduring partnership with husband Jon.-Poetry Playhouse Publications In a rare collection that melds wit with poignancy, Deborah Coy's poems lead us through the well-lived and well-loved life of a woman who proclaims, "Shiny with age/I fiddle with the braille of past feasts." But these poems do not belabor what was.They emerge, sexy and irreverent, tender and familiar, to celebrate adventure and surprise, that is, to eloquently record a common yet extraordinary life. Fierce witness of the present, Coy insists she will "rise in the stirrups and shout, "hallelujah"-We are lucky to join the ride.-Barbara Rockman, author, "to cleave" Deborah Coy embraces the spirit of The Crone throughout this book, bringing her indelible wit and wisdom to the page as she looks back on childhood, family, sex, religion, and politics through the eyes of a woman who accepts aging and even the inevitability of death. Her trademark humor is on full display whether she describes herself ("my skin is / one size too large"), her rejection of God ("I thought I had love / but he unfriended me"), or those with Santa fetishes ("They croon 'Santa Baby' / when they see my package."). She can be cantankerous or sweet, erotic or serious-often all at once-like the Super Crone she envisions. Not just a hand-me-down crone of folklore, Coy creates her own folklore here, including in a series of Josephine poems. In contemplating her composted body, she claims "I will be delicious." Indeed, she already is. Taste!You won't be disappointed.-Scott Wiggerman, Albuquerque poet, instructor, editor, artist This is a consummate book of poetry written by an inspired, mature poet. Deb Coy has been writing all her life, and this is the book of a lifetime filled with enchanting and imaginative details of nature and deep insights into sensual and emotional experience. Her language is inventive and often clever in her turns of phrase and observations that surprise the reader. Highly original in the subjects she contemplates, Coy's style is brilliant. Super Crone is a penetrating exploration of the nature of aging and of nature itself in its solitary and overwhelming presence.-Carol Moscrip is the author of six chapbooks and Straw, poems, a Pushcart Prize nominee.

The story of a Farmers' Rights Campaign that changed the farmer political landscape and provided Ireland with a representative farmer's organisation, divorced from party politics, peopled by democratically elected leaders at every level.

I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s - pre-television, telephone, motor car, and when the radio was turned on almost exclusively for the news. Our best memories are of the nights of storytelling, banter, and card playing, through the long winter nights, with a blazing fire in the hearth, and a little oil lamp on the wall. Every area had its variety of characters, and some of them were witty individuals who could relate even the most mundane incidents as hilarious stories. This book contains the stories, poems, recitations and monologues that we used to entertain each other in the 1950's to 1970's

These are private, visceral poems in which Bart White hands over to the reader, in forthright language throughout the volume, the intricacies of life's vicissitudes. Whether it's in nature, human relationships, or politics, the poet invokes this tactile language as a medium to bring into focus solutions to the complexities revealed. -Robert Gibbons, author of Spent Some Time with Lorca in New York Near to him in his familial world of marriage and children, or from other current places of insane benighted repression and murder, or even from 2000 years ago when the poet manages to translate the touching Latin words on a five-year-old child's sarcophagus, in The Art of Restoration we're always within an empathetic sensibility that may bring us to tears. I found myself caught up in Bart White's austere but still romantic poems. He is brutally honest with himself as he probes our human condition, realizes-makes real for himself-the often ironic beauty of nature, and, in William Stafford's words, places his feet with care in such a world. Here is a poet with a big heart & a brain singed by experience. This poet wants our company, and in many ways, we need his.-William Heyen, author of Nature: New & Selected Poems 1970-2020 Bart White's The Art of Restoration takes a close look at generosity. Through his lens of what is most personal, in both public and private circumstances, we come to an understanding of what is universal in his lyric-narrative poems. We recognize our own lives in his hopes and fears as we experience first-hand the ways in which he expresses his faith, living day to day, trying to make sense of the unexpected crises that disturb his desire for happiness. What is the cost of this worldly weight? How does he carry us along in these poems that confront us-speaking to what we fear most-loss of love, of loved ones, of our precious lives? "Is the road clear" becomes a metaphor of finding one's self. Yet, what is striking is how that road is cleared in both physical and spiritual landscapes. Generosity isn't what you think it is- it's lonesome work- it requires us to heal from the inside out. And, when it truly works, it offers happiness to many, not just a few chosen ones.-M.J. Iuppa, author of The Weight of Air and Rock, Paper, Scissors

This is the latest poetry collection by award-winning poet, journalist, and essayist Lawrence Welsh of El Paso, Texas, who has thirteen poetry books to his credit, and has appeared in over 300 publications. His American Skull contains multitudes: vast deserts, lost highways, desperate cities, all accompanied by a plaintive harmonica. And somewhere, further back, an Irish fiddle. As poet John Macker observes, In Lawrence Welsh's latest book, American skulls and bones are strewn across the borderlands like feverish prayers; look inside one and it sees through you into an emptiness or openness that the desert becomes. As empty as it seems, he fills it all with empathy and nuance. His language is also generous, and his landscapes are full of soul.